March bleated exuberantly as another hound went soaring across the field. The twins’ reaction, at least, assured me that if we escaped today intact, I’d have no trouble getting them to like Rook.
Shouldn’t we keep them from watching this? I asked Emma with a rather crazed glance.
Emma shot back an equally crazed look that said, Oh, believe me, I’ve tried.
A creaking, groaning noise came from outside. I returned my attention to the window. The thorn vines were freezing in place from the base upward, their heavily spiked tendrils zigzagging into sharp angles as they stiffened, forming a dense, impenetrable-looking thicket. Vertigo swooped through my stomach. I abandoned my efforts at searching the yard and focused inward instead, concentrating on the ensorcellment bond between us. Surely if something had happened to Rook, I would have felt his reaction. The vines weren’t dead, just motionless. Whatever was going on out there, he’d done it on purpose—hadn’t he?
The kitchen door banged open and boots thudded through the hallway, Rook’s long stride unmistakable. I briefly pressed my eyes closed, riding out the relieved dizziness that washed over me. But I didn’t have a chance to indulge in the sensation.
“He’s coming,” Rook said as soon as he entered the room. “We have little time.”
His chest heaved like a bellows, and his hair was so rumpled he looked as though he’d been standing in the middle of a storm. One of his sleeves was rolled up, with a dishrag from our kitchen messily bound around his forearm. I tried not to consider the implications of this—he’d never needed to bind his wounds before. Maybe he just didn’t want to make a mess with his blood indoors.
Grimly, Emma and I met each other’s eyes across the parlor.
“Can you take the twins to the cellar?” I asked.
This might be the last time we ever saw each other alive. The knowledge made holding her gaze like staring into the sun. She had sworn to raise me and keep me safe, but now faced losing me to the same force that had already shattered our lives once. And suddenly I knew with terrible clarity that if she lost me, she didn’t know if she’d have the strength to pick herself back up again. In that moment there were two Emmas transposed over each other—the Emma who had raised me, and the Emma she kept hidden from me, an Emma I’d barely even met before. An Emma I might never have the chance to get to know as I grew older.
The spell broke.
“You heard your sister,” Emma said briskly, though she sounded very tired. She came over and picked March up. May slid off the settee, subdued. Both twins watched me uncertainly. I couldn’t start crying again. Not now.
“I love you all and I’ll be done by lunchtime,” I declared in my best Isobel’s-a-busy-perfectionist voice. When May opened her mouth I interrupted, “May, I know you don’t hate me.” If I gave her the chance to say it herself, I wouldn’t be able to maintain my composure. “Now hurry up.”
Before they went, Emma pressed a kiss to the top of my head. I set my jaw and tilted my face toward the ceiling, and waited until I heard their feet thumping down the stairs to let the tears fall. Sniffing industriously, I swiped the wetness away on my wrists, stabbed my paintbrush into a whorl of vermilion and lead tin yellow, and got back to work. It was just finishing touches now. A handful of flaws glared at me from the canvas—a patch of shadow that needed more purple light reflected on it, a slab of the crown that could use more highlights for dimension—but I didn’t have time to fix them all. The most important part, I told myself, was done.
Fabric swished as Rook moved to stand beside me. As he absorbed what I had wrought, a profound stillness settled over him. That stillness told me everything I needed to know. A pause, and then I set my brush down. Confidence swelled within me as surely and calmly as the rising tide, filling in every cavernous doubt.
My Craft was true.
A horn sounded, rattling the windows in their frames, low-pitched and sonorous with disdain. Sunlight speared through the parlor as crystal shattered outside—the thorns had fallen to the Alder King. Buoyed by a giddy certainty as intoxicating as wine, I looked up at Rook and smiled.
He tore his gaze from the portrait, startled. At some point his glamour had fled from him. His hair hung in a wild snarl around the disquieting planes of his face. He scrutinized me with inhuman eyes, cruel eyes that weren’t made to show kindness or tenderness or love, but they still spoke clearly to the fact that I was behaving oddly, even for a mortal, and especially for me.